Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

Got any figures for that? That's not the way I read the ones I saw in that article, but I don't have the full information - so I'm happy to be corrected. I saw sales increasing and profits going down. Which isn't great. I think it reflects the market was getting more crowded. It may also be that Nokia were selling more low-end phones, at less profit. Also, they had a great Q4, in an otherwise lacklustre 2010, when profits were creeping down, on mostly stagnant sales in a market growing at a double digit rate. So they bled about 10% market share in smartphones (from memory).

Symbian was looking tired and outdated, and doing badly. Rather like MS with Windows Mobile 6, they'd sat on their laurels too long, not improving much, and the market was about to poo all over them. They'd been overtaken, but sales weren't yet reflecting that. Elop made that worse with burning platforms I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that Symbian wouldn't have collapsed to around its current level anyway in not much longer.

I don't think you could categorise my posts as a rant. I'm no defender of Elop. But there's some absolutely bonkers criticism of him out there. As if Nokia were doing fine, and only he ruined it. Possibly as part of a conspiracy with MS... Nokia were not doing fine. They'd sat still as market leaders too long, wasted too much excellent R&D, and were heading for a fall of some size whatever happened. Android at the £100 price-point and £20 Chinese dumb-phones are a hell of a disruption to the market. Plus Apple at the top end, and Samsung everywhere.

But thanks for at least discussing with me. I'm happy to learn from people who have seen better figures than the crap that often gets posted online.

Re: Differentiating

David,

My Lumia 710 runs everything I chuck at it perfectly. Faster than my last (stutter-y) Android. And I paid £120 for it, so I'm happy it was year old hardware. Although I suspect Nokia made no profit on that, as they were trying to flog them for £300 in Jan 2012. At which price I'd call them a rip-off - Android was far better value, and the route I'd have gone.

dogged's figures look about ^1/3rd higher than the ones I saw 2 months ago. Being analyst projectsion/guesses, I'd be taking whole heapfuls of salt with them...

Re: Differentiating

David Hicks,

I can't remember where I saw the figures now, I had a search for sales figures in about November - I think after I'd seen an article in IT Pro. It's not market share really, it's sales, so takes a long time to feed through to big numbers to make developers happy. I saw figures from a couple of different analysts that had Win Pho at 10% of sales in Italy and doing well in Europe and China. Don't think it did brilliantly in the US with Win Pho 7, but there was a suggestion that 8 was getting better sales with the phone companies. It's all conjecture because of everyone being so secretive about their numbers.

Also, with 8 only coming out in October, it's possible that a lot of these sales were actually heavily discounted Win Pho 7 phones, Lumia 710s and 600s - which means they're in the same boat as with Symbian, selling phones at the cheap end at crappy (or negative) margins.

Ballmer said sales had more than doubled last month, which isn't exactly great, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Did the N900 need more specs? My Lumia 710 would run Android 4 really badly, but there's never any stuttering on Win Pho 7 The last, Tango, update actually cut the memory requirements. Though 8 seems to need full modern specs though.

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

I'm seeing a lot of downvotes, but not much in the way of actual arguments against the valid points in my post. I make no claims for having a monopoly on being right, but I'm not trolling. Does this mean perhaps that people can't come up with valid reasons for their prejudice, but just have to vote it anyway? Surely the downvote button is for trolls and idiots, not people you just disagree with?

Re: Ex-Nokia exec and mobile industry strategist Tomi Ahonen...

Although that is the article where he says Symbian was "winning", why dump it? Which someone damages his credibility...

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

Eadon,

There's some good points in that analysis. But also quite a lot of bollocks. Nokia was making barely any more profits from Symbian than it was from dumbphones. And that was a diminishing amount too, with massive competition from China. Nokia had brilliant supply chain organisation, and that kept the cheaper Chinese manufacturers at bay for a while, but not forever. That's barely discussed in the article, but visible from the charts. It needs a better break-down of smartphone sales, into Win Pho, high-end Symbian and cheap Symbian. With profits for each.

Nokia needed to move its sales to the high end smartphones. They probably had the in-house software to do that, but as they'd been failing to bring it to market for the last 5 years, Elop clearly didn't trust them to do it this time either, and so went for something outside that was already done. Whatever he did was a bet with the company's survival, and that wasn't his fault, but due to piss-poor past management.

Whether Elop has been rubbish at managing his sales channels is a matter I'm not qualified to judge. I've got no information. But given how poor the rest of the analysis is, I'm not prepared to take it on trust from that author.

Re: Dying app store?

I like Windows Phone. The app store sucks. Really badly. And hasn't noticeably improved over the year I've had the phone. Worse, Andrew O says that there was very little new content for the launch of Win Pho 8. That's pretty piss-poor from MS.

I don't care. I barely use apps on my phone. That's all on the tablet. Even when I had Android I only used about 5 apps regularly. And 3 of those were to replace stock Android modules I thought were rubbish.

For £10m MS could pay some devs to write 50 apps. Just seed the market with a decent free torch app, that actually works and doesn't steal your data. Simple stuff like that. Spend another few million on helping the BBC get an iPlayer app out, and some of the big mainstream ones. It would be cheaper than spending the same cash on advertising, to have Sky, the BBC and other media companies saying regularly, "go to the Marketplace to download our application to your Windows Mobile phone."

Re: "they adopted an OS that offers nothing in the way is differentiation"

Dave Fox,

I don't think that's Elop's point at all. He doesn't need to differentiate Nokia from the others on Win Phone, because no other manufacturer is taking it seriously as an OS. Sammy and HTC (and LG?) have phones, but it's not their main effort. Although HTC seem to be trying harder with Win Pho 8.

Android is a crowded space. You need to shout really loud to get noticed above everyone else in that lot. Plus you've got Huawei, ZTE and maybe Lenovo all trying to break into the world markets and therefore sell at little to no profit to grow share. As well as Google themselves launching the Nexus 4 at a ridiculously cheap price.

Re: Differentiating

JahBless,

MS might be much more restrictive than Google with Android, but Nokia seems to be the 'top dog' in the Win Pho market, so they don't need to differentiate. Plus they do have Nokia maps and the shiny camera on the 920.

As far as I can see Win Pho's now around 5% of the smartphone market, so improving acceptably, and in a position to accelerate rapidly, or nosedive...

I think you're being a bit unfair on Andrew O though. The tone of his Nokia Win Pho articles gives me the impression that he really likes the OS, with occasional frustration at the limitations. Like a good parent when he sees the faults, he's not angry... He's disappointed. I'm in pretty much the same situation. I like Win Pho 7, my Nokia Lumia 710 was great for £120. But I'm not buying another smartphone without Gorilla glass (or equivalent), and I'm not paying much over £200 - when I can have a new iPad for £400.

Given how cheap Android tablets have now got, I'm not sure I'll be replacing my iPad with another, at double the price. And the Nexus 4 is looking unbeatable at £230. Nokia seem to be selling their Win Pho 8 handsets at full price. I think they had to buy their market share last year, with heavy discounts. I don't wish them ill, but I'm not handing them £400 - so I may only buy if things go wrong, and they have to do the same again.

In my opinion Win Pho is the best phone I've used. Though I've not tried WebOS or Blackberry. But for a mobile computer to do everything I'd say Android shades iOS, Apple often has better apps, except where it refuses to let you do stuff. Win Pho isn't customisable enough to be up there, and the app store is rubbish. At the same price I'd probably still pick Win Pho though - it's a phone first for me.

The Apple TV box doesn't need to be cheaper, it needs to be better. For £300, with a hard disk for recording, a DVD/Blu Ray player and connection to Macs / iPads / iPhones and the iTunes/AppStore it would be great. But they don't want to give you all that, they want you buying content on iTunes, often at twice the price you can get it on DVD. So it's a useful but limited device.

Admittedly at £100, it's almost tempting to get one just to play with. Given the low margins on screens I wonder if Apple will just knock out a Mac Mini with many bells and whistles. But if they're going to continue their war on DVDs I'll look elsewhere to avoid having to have more than one device.

As someone who can't read text on a TV screen, this smart TV thing is passing me by. I'd like to run my TV from my iPad or phone, but have one box that does iPlayer and other catch-up services, DVD and maybe Netflix. So far I'm looking at just buying/building a cheap PC and doing it with MythTV or Windows. Having finally got a Bluetooth speaker (cheap from the dying Currys), it's rather nice to run my music from my iPad while sitting on the sofa. Now it's time to sit down and do the research on running the telly properly. If only the TV manufacturers had a clue...

As well as being an annoying arse, our anonymous Coward is also a bit of a liar. I present two quotes to you. From the OP we have:

I currently have... 21 windows open on this PC, one of those is Firefox with a dozen tabs as well. And it's a fairly light day today at work and I've been quite focused in the things I'm working on. Some days there's far more than that and the pc struggles to handle it.

And from the cut'n'paste job of our Windows-bashing idiot we have:

> I currently have... 21 windows open on this PC, one of those is Firefox with a dozen tabs ... and the pc struggles to handle it.

Notice the rather crucial difference?

I'm never quite sure when to ignore trolls and when to respond. Partly because you're never sure with the anonymous ones whether they're trolls or tools. You get to learn by experience with the named ones.

I guess with misquoting skills like that, they should be able to get a job with the Today Program on Radio 4, or most newspapers.

Re: The Paperless Toilet

The Japanese have toilets that will squirt warm water up your bottom, then blow warm air at you until dry and fluffy. You can buy them in Blighty for about £6,000.

Simon Harris,

Well played sir!

Re: Morons

That should give other wannabe criminals paws for thought. Even if things had gone purrrfectly, the miscreant would still have had to strip a bunch of gaffer tape from an angry cat, and probably got clawed in the eyes.

I think it's easy to know who's guilty though. In cell 23 (or possibly not?) is prisoner 9512387 Schrodinger. I reckon it was him.

Have you never heard of diplomacy? It's the skill of saying (sometimes unpleasant) things to other governments, without starting a war. Ask a diplomat for a quote, they'll speak like a diplomat. It's their job. They're very useful to have around the place. If you ask nicely, they'll translate for you.

Was it Talleyrand who said that diplomacy was the art of saying 'nice doggy' while you fetch a rock?

As an example of why diplomatic language being opaque is important, see this Telegraph piece by Charles Crawford (ex ambassador and sometimes interesting commentator on stuff). Ignore the fact that it's about Assange, and concentrate on how the FCO mis-stepped, and ended up in hot water.

There's no money there. Even the North Korean government struggles for cash. Schmidt is already a billionaire isn't he? So I very much doubt he's in it for the money. At least not directly. He may be in it for the prestige, which might lead to money later, but that's a different matter.

I'm sure he has his reasons. Possibly nefarious, possibly humanitarian, who knows? He's close to the Obama government, so if he isn't doing some back-channel communications for them, then he's being rather embarrassing.

Re: They are traveling in an unofficial capacity ...

Robert Heinlein visited the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and wrote a piece about it. He came up with the game of trying not to see the stadium. In every town you go to, the guides want to show you the local sports stadium, because it's non-controversial, and usually empty. So their are no embarrassing questions to avoid answering, and no even more embarrassing meetings with people. Even better, it wastes lots of time, in which they don't have to run interference on you.

He said that he only managed to avoid seeing the stadium in one city he went to. So that's a clear win to Intourist...

But it's about WWII anyway?

True. But the codebook is supposed to be from the Royal Flying Corps in WWI So how come it has a code for blitz?

Re: Obviousness of bad code - some Friday thoughts

graeme leggett,

Very true. I sometimes have to get my hands dirty and get building plans, to try and work out what they want for their water services. Some of the drawings are absolutely horrible, and you wonder how they ever get the buildings put up right.

It took me 2 hours yesterday working through the drawings to get some information that I could have got in 10 minutes if they'd done a proper schematic as well. Also, if you've got a schematic to look at first the drawings (which are necessarily complex, messy and confusing) are a lot easier to understand afterwards. Admittedly it also didn't help that they'd split each floor into 3 separate sheets, and because it went round a corner at one end, had used a blank space on one sheet to put the corner bit, rather than continue onto a fourth. [shudder]

There are 2 extractor fans, 2' apart, in the kitchen in my flat. My working theory is that the architect drew the ducting in the wrong place (or it was built wrong) and it was easier to just retrofit a new fan in the ceiling than to connect up the extractor above the hob...

I can't remember if the Germans were using the word Panzer in WW1, and even if so, were the allies? Churchill said that the original codename was cisterns, and he changed it to tanks, as it was easier to say... Saved us from sounding silly at least.

I'm pretty sure neither side was using the word Blitzkrieg anyway. Or even Blitz.

I remember reading a piece on here by Bill Ray that mentioned the mobile companies are regulated differently from the ISPs. I don't remember why this is now, or in fact many details at all. But one of the things he mentioned is that they have to filter for adult content. Can't remember if that's a term of their license, or different regulation either I'm afraid.

I'd imagine it's not something that's heavily mentioned anywhere, so I'd guess the call centre drone you spoke to didn't know, did know that filtering's not an option, and so just assumed that they weren't.

Re: ActiveSync

jkt2,

Win Pho isn't the locked in nightmare that some people seem to think. On my email set up screen in Win Pho 7.5 I have options for Windows Live and Outlook, Nokia/Yahoo/Googlemail, POP and IMAP.

I don't know what they support in terms of CalDAV and CardDAV though. I have a vague recollection that along with IMAP on iOS you can use CardDAV, but it doesn't do CalDAV. Or that could be t'other way round.

The problem isn't that email isn't going to work, it's that Active Sync does push and synchs calendars and address books as well as email. Whereas IMAP doesn't do any of those, and Google's implementation of IMAP is a bit poo.

I believe you can set up a Windows Live account out of the box with Windows Phone.

It'll be interesting to see if Google send an email to people using Active Sync to explain what they're doing and how to work around it. I use an iPad, a Windows Phone and GMail to synch some things between them, so I've got a foot in all camps at the moment.

Re: ActiveSync

jkt2,

I'm not sure it's much comfort to iOS users when their synching stops working. There are open calendar and contacts standards that GMail may operate (possibly even minus the IMAP bugs...). But as I understand it Apple's own apps use Active Sync. So they can move to Google's app, but when another app wants to send an email it'll launch the native Apple mail client first. Unlike Android you can't have another app become default. So the one's that understand the problem will be able to solve it. More likely, they'll have to ask someone else.

As for Win Pho I doubt that's mostly sold to people who knew they were signing up for MS lock-in. As MS are aiming it at consumers. Maybe they'll put their email stopping working down to MS, and move to Android. Or maybe they'll put it down to Google and move to Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever-they-call-it-next week...

I've got Win Pho 7, so I admit to being a touch grumpy about this. But I was only using GMail as an easy synching tool, so I can easily swap. The business stuff goes through our Exchange server.

I'm looking at a new phone anyway, it may be another Android (Nexus 4 looks yummy), but Google have been annoying me of late, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't dump them and go a different route.

Re: Fixed it for ya, Microsoft...

It doesn't use anything proprietary, the Gmail app uses IMAP. Apparently they do add some pixie dust to help it along, I'm not sure of the details.

badmonkey,

I've no problem with people saying open standards are better. There's a valid argument against that, which is that proprietary ones can change faster with less need to fight stuff through committees. But obviously not being locked to one vendor can be a huge advantage.

However, Google are saying there are open standards to do this, so they're not disadvantaging their customers. Except even they can't use those same open standards without having to resort to hacks and workarounds. Which they're keeping to themselves. i.e. there's no functional difference from something proprietary. You've got the same vendor lock-in, and lack of interoperability.

To add to the fun, Google didn't implement IMAP properly in GMail either. Which reminds me, I've got to fix my Mum's email due to GMail Thunderbird IMAP problems. Which I believe are Google's fault, but then I've also read people being rude about Mozilla's implementation of IMAP. Does anyone do it right? Why is email so hard, when it's one of the most important protocols on the internet? Why are there so few decent email clients? Sorry, I'll shut up before I descend into off-topic ranting.

jkt2,

A good reason that Google might want to consider paying Microsoft actual money to use Exchange Active Sync is that their users want them to. Also, it works. Whereas Google's implementation of IMAP doesn't (at least not properly or consistently). Also iOS uses the same protocol to connect to GMail doesn't it?

Google are perfectly willing to sacrifice their customers' in order to pursue a corporate bunfight. It's their servers, their rules. But that does risk their customers deciding to bugger off though.

And yes, I'm aware that GMail is kind-of free. Although the cost is actually access to your personal data and permission to show targeted ads, so it could be argued that it's not cheap after all. Anyway, Google recognise it's a valuable service, because they're keeping it for their paying customers, so they can't argue that open standards are better. Not being cost-effective is a perfectly valid argument though. But they didn't use that.

Re: Fixed it for ya, Microsoft...

Eadon,

Please stop accusing everyone of being a shill, or just fuck off. I'm getting very bored of that shit. Someone holds a different opinion to you. Please just deal with it.

Also I thought the AC's points were valid. Active Sync is better than IMAP. Or at least in my (admittedly) limited experience of using Android, iOS and Win Pho 7 mail/calendar/contacts clients.

I can perfectly well understand Google dropping it. If it costs them a license fee, and if Android is using Google's own proprietary software, then they can both save cash paid to MS and make Android look better than the other mobile OS's.

But stat's still no reason for even Google fans to defend the decision. Google are making things worse for their customers, at short notice for reasons that look to be more corporate bunfight than cost-saving. GMail is not a very good IMAP client, because Google haven't implemented that open standard very well (not that IMAP ever seems to get consistently implemented by anyone...). Given that, have Google bothered to do CalDAV and CardDAV properly either? Or is this just more proprietary software?

Also, as Google's Android mail client is a bit rubbish, and their calendar and contacts ones are worse, can other Android programs use the Google proprietary crap, or will the best Android software also have to use their non-standard implementation of IMAP? Leaving even Android users wanting to migrate away from GMail?

It's even more like London for Syrians now. As the regime have started firing off SCUDs at their own people. I don't think there's a great deal of difference between a SCUD and a V2 really. Although they seem to have less than 50, and the Germans built thousands of the buggers.

veti,

I don't think the bothered so much with false reports during the first blitz. The Germans were doing lots of flying, so had gun camera footage, and recon planes up. Plus there were lots of bombings, so they information wouldn't have been all that helpful. Though they did start playing games with the Germans' radio direction finding, and getting them to bomb fields, so they'll have had to play the propaganda game there.

By the time of the V1s and V2s the Germans would have struggled to get a recon flight above London to survive, and they were aiming blind. So they broadcast reports and used double-agents to sow disinformation to suggest the things were over-shooting London - this got the Germans to start dropping more short onto Kent. Bit hard on the people of Kent that...

They were able to do this, as it turns out MI5 had managed to catch every single German spy in the country^[1], and turned a good number of them too. So the Germans just weren't getting any decent information.

^[1] There was a seaside landlady in Southampton who confessed to the papers about 10 years ago, in which case she may have been the only free German agent operating in Britain - I've not seen any other mention of her, but most of my WWII history books are over 10 years old.

Re: What's green, got eight legs, and would probably kill you if it fell out of a tree?

How do you make a snooker table laugh?

.

.

.

.

You put your hand in its pockets, and tickle its balls.

Re: Fascinating but.....

Actually, Churchill instigated the carpet-bombing of civilians during WW2

madra,

Nope.

Still, don't let the facts get in the way of your primary school level uncritical, unquestioning belief in the angelic innocence of the British war machine.

Don't worry, I won't. I suggest you do a bit more research before firing both barrels though.

If we ignore the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil war, which isn't really part of WWII, we have Japan bombing cities in China in 1937/1938. Then in 1939 the Germans did a lot of bombing of cities during the invasion of Poland, and kept it up all through the war.

I don't remember the exact details of who started the bombing of cities during the Battle of Britain, but I don't think there was much in the way of deliberate policy on the British side. There were a couple of small raids, and accidental raids (planes dumping bombs having not reached their targets), and I seem to remember Churchill ordering the bombing of Berlin after one of these on London. But then the Germans had been bombing ports, and that meant bombing the cities they were in, and factory bombing was so inaccurate at the time as to be indistinguishable from bombing civilians. When Hitler and Goering ordered the bombing of London the RAF were admittedly quite pleased that they were no longer bombing airfields and radar stations (hard on the civilians that), but there's no evidence I've ever seen to say that was deliberate strategy on the part of Churchill or the RAF.

Re: At that speed Windows 3.1 did not disgrace itself.

You were lucky! My first computer were even worse. It only had 2 x 3" floppies, and mine was labelled CP/M boot disc. That were my Amstrad PCW 8256. The Vic 20 and Amstrad CPC464 before than were my brothers'.